Above: a composite image of 4 out of 10 'in-progress shots" of the
image I am currently trying to paint digitally.
Ok, I need to take a minute for a little progress report
before I forget what I have gone through. I have been working on doing a
digital painting of the ‘mermaid’ drawing (gonna title it “the trouble with
mermaids”) that was my final project for the Comics Experience anatomy class.
It has gone through 10 revisions and there has definitely been “TROUBLE.” I am
finally at a point where it seems like I’m making some progress – just getting
started on the coloring!
I am trying a technique of doing the values in black white
and grey over the line art and painting in color on a layer (or layers) over
first. It sounds so simple.
What took 9 revisions?
Well, I also decided to try using layer masks to separate
the image into parts – and I think that is where things got overly complicated.
Probably because I was looking at a variety of tutorials and it occurred to me
today that I might be trying to do too many different and unrelated things at
the same time.
Tutorials:
Imaginefx#90 Sam Didier “picture a pair of fighting heroes”
Imaginefx #82 Iconic wonder woman – where I got the idea
about layer masks.
Serge Birault painting hair tutorial on muddycolors http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/12/how-to-digitally-paint-hair.html
…and random others.
Here are some things that I have discovered the hard way:
1. If the plan is to do a value study and paint over it
using a layer set to ‘overlay’ you do not want to have a lot of white or black
in the under-painting. In fact, start from a dark grey (70%) and work into it
adding lights and darks (50 to 85%). Stay away from the default black and white
– overlay colors will not show up over them. This is most painfully confusing
when painting a color over white and having nothing happen… the white stays,
the color disappers.
2. Layer masks and flats are essentially 2 very different ways
to do almost the same thing - easily select specific areas.
Layer masks have the advantage of being able to be applied
to a group of layers all at once (in a folder – see the bottom of the layers
palette for the little folder icon). Also layer masks are a bit easier to edit
by painting on them wit black and white. They are also a lot more complicated
in terms of keeping things organized – at least for me, so far. Hopefully as I
get more used to them that will be less of a problem.
3. right clicking/ctrl+clicking on a layer mask will allow
for some really useful options:
-add mask to selection- (aka create a selection from mask),
-subtract mask from selection, and
-intersect mask and selection –or something like that, adds
masked area to a selection.
Useful stuff to remember.
